


She Who Remains

by FireEye



Category: Zero | Project Zero | Fatal Frame Series, Zero: Akai Chou | Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 11:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12886473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/pseuds/FireEye
Summary: Kureha died.  Life goes on around her.





	She Who Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elwing_alcyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/gifts).



Her throat is red.

The still-warm blood stands out against her moonlight pale flesh, the pattern of a butterfly’s wing.

This must be what it is like.

For a moment – a brief moment, lost in wonder – she feels that this is what it is like to be whole.

Kureha has never seen herself.

Not even the go-shintai reflected her so clearly.

At long last, she raises her gaze to the one who killed her.

“Very well.”

Kureha’s voice drips from the air.

The knife drops to the floor.

The terrified screaming goes unheard.

***

The villagers inter her body beneath the shrine.  The priests speak gentle sutras to sooth her spirit.

Not all are displeased to see her gone.  And, Kureha finds, as the years of her life pass from living memory and the flesh rots off her bones, none linger as long as she.

***

The memories of her life are fleeting.

Dreamlike.

For the shame of bringing twins into the world, only for one to be strangled not upon the altar, her mother is made into a Kusabi.

For the madness of trying to strangle one of the Remaining in his grief, her father is put to a much simpler death.  One that does not redeem his sin.

A child grows up between worlds.

To appease the Hellish Abyss, twins are bought from another village.  From a family that cannot feed them.  Later, their grandfather tries to bargain for their return, then tries to sneak them away during the Shadow Festival.  Once he understands the truth, he cannot leave.

As they were given to redeem her family, they are given to redeem her Ceremony.

The Ceremony that should have been hers brings peace to Minakami.

The Remaining brother disappears into the forest.  Spirited away, perhaps.

He is not seen again.

Kureha remains.

***

A child is staring at her during a simple, more mundane ceremony at the temple.  The child is young – too young to understand her role in life, and the honor that awaits her – but, distracted by a crimson butterfly that flutters through the room, she _sees_ Kureha.

She is not afraid.

Kureha is bemused.

Later, playing a hiding game, the child finds the Door.

For as long as Kureha had wandered through its empty rooms, no one else had found the Hidden House, certainly none of the living.

Once inside the dreamlike, ever changing rooms, the child is lost.

While the priests and the Ceremony Master and the villagers search the Shrine and the village and the forest, Kureha walks through the Door into the Hidden House and finds the child who did not fear her.  Kureha indulges the child’s childlike curiosity and plays her games with her, and leads her back into the world of the living, where she has been missing for four days instead of mere hours.

The priests, hearing the child’s tale of the woman who led her home, invoke old sutras anew.

Unseen, Kureha merely smiles at their sudden devotion.

The child returns, year after year.  Always with a new game and or a new question or a story of life in the village, and only once with fear of the Ceremony that was coming.

In tears over how her sister doesn’t want to become one with her.

Kureha soothes her.

They’re twins.

Two halves of a whole.

Of course her sister wants to become whole, deep down.

The child smiles and does not return.

A butterfly flutters in the shrine and vanishes in sunlight.

After that, twins who lose their courage make their offerings and prayers to Kureha.

Very few of them see her.

***

Four twins.

Four offerings.

Four prayers.

Four desires.

Then Darkness.

Kureha is no stranger to the dark.  But this is different.  This is Darkness overflowing, Darkness overwhelming.

This is primordial night, for which there is no dawn.

It erodes at her very sense of self.

It takes all of her strength to withstand the Repentance.  It seeks to claim her memories, her suffering, her _being_ and make them its own.  It seeks to own her.

It seeks to _become_ her.

Kureha alone withstands.

***

In a place frozen in time, she waits.

She is no more alone now than when she was born.

Alone among the butterflies.

Kureha remains.

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of a character study I'd wanted to write for one of your older prompts when I'd seen it, but didn't get to last year. I hope you like it. :)


End file.
